RIP LOL

Apparently, people don’t LOL anymore

This can't be true.  I hear people laughing all the time.  It's remarkably common.  Especially around people looking at your face.  BOOM!

Uhm...terrific.  Today's Sametime Status deals not so much with the actual action of laughing out loud (which is what LOL stands for in Internets-speak, for those of you who somehow are reading an online Blag without ever being exposed to the Internets before.  It does not, in fact stand for Lots Of Love)  Of course, comedian Demetri Martin pointed out at one point that most people don't actually LOL when they say LOL, and that LQTM would make for a more apt acronym.  LQTM standing for "Laughing Quietly To Myself."  

Anyway, it used to be quite common for people to say LOL in text-based conversations, be they over text messaging, Sametime conversations, Facebook personal messages, or some other instant messaging program.  However, nowadays, with the advent of Emojis and an overall maturation of pithy text-based chatting, it seems as if LOL has fallen out of favor.  And since we live in a society where this sort of thing happens, Facebook decided to pay somebody to do a study about how much cachet LOL still has. 

Turns out, not very much.  

According to Presumably Scientific Data published by Facebook, based on an entire week's worth of comments and messages, only 1.9% of people used "LOL" to denote laughter, favoring "haha," "hehe," or some form of emoji.  This is sad.  

It's mostly sad because Facebook is actively reading everybody's personal messages, but that's apparently beside the point.